Quotable & notable
?The question is, are we intentionally setting up charter schools to fail.'' ? Larry Maloney, owner of Aspire Educational Consulting Company and author of a recent Ball State charter school study
?The question is, are we intentionally setting up charter schools to fail.'' ? Larry Maloney, owner of Aspire Educational Consulting Company and author of a recent Ball State charter school study
This week Fordham hosted two discussions revolving around our latest book, Ohio's Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Frontlines, wh
There's more than Russlynn Ali's pledge to root out seven-year-old misogynists that's dubious about the federal anti-bullying conference and it is the federal anti-bullying conference.
The federal government's first anti-bullying summit concluded yesterday. Modern-day bullying, it seems, is no longer the semi-amusing stuff of high-school-themed movies and sitcoms; swirlies and wedgies have given way to what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described in his opening remarks as ?racial, sexual, or disability harassment prohibited by the civil rights laws.?
Now that the battle over adoption of the Common Core ELA and math standards is largely over (with more than three quarters of students in America now in Common Core states), attention is turning sharply?and appropriately?in the direction of implementati
In my previous post about the New York Times, I intentionally ignored a small elephant in the room (skunk at the garden party?), one best described in a recent Whitney Tilson email blast?? I quote, ?He's baaaaaack??
Katherine writes, ?In the past, too many states set standards and administered assessments that had no real teeth.? Teachers then ignored these edentulous standards, ignored these gummy assessments, at least until the ?few weeks leading up to test administration.?
The point has been made but deserves reiteration: how predictable to read, in last week's Gadfly, that national standards supporters are already starting to move for a national
Richard Allington, Anne McGill-Franzen, Gregory Camilli, Lunetta Williams, Jennifer Graff, Jacqueline Zeig, Courtney Zmach, Rhonda Nowak; University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleJournal of Reading PsychologySeptember 2010, forthcoming
Joshua Breslau, Elizabeth Miller, W-J Joanie Chung, and Julie B. Schweitzer; UC Davis School of MedicineJournal of Psychiatric ResearchJune 2010
Remember that small law named No Child Left Behind? While Washington has been swept up in talk of RTT, SIG, i3, and a host of other acronyms, the one we all love to hate is still going strong. So are its infamous supplemental educational services (i.e., free tutoring), required when a school has been failing for three or more years in a row.
In a guest editorial here last week, Sol Stern observed that New York State had significantly raised the bar for meeting proficiency requirements on state tests and that fewer students are meeting the new standard (“The testing mess,” August 5, 2010).
They say boys are from Mars, and girls are from Venus, and Imagine Southeast Public Charter School in D.C. couldn't agree more. Part of a growing experiment in single-sex education, Imagine is a "dual academy," which means it serves both boys and girls, but keeps them separated in different classrooms except for special occasions.
There's a movement afoot in Hawaii to do away with the elected school board. That according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser:
What is the biggest challenge in education? For these colleges, it's not the race gap.
?One of the nice things about single-gender classes is that we require more training in general for these teachers. And there is more buy-in from teachers this way. ?Try some of these things and see what happens,' we tell them, and then they'll listen to more substantial training about classroom effectiveness.''
Yesterday I noted that the most exciting efforts to improve school food are occurring locally, not nationally. A tip-top example is the goings-on in Washington, D.C., where a fresh D.C.
Spend time in education-policy circles and you will hear it, that most uninspiring phrase: The devil is in the details. When uttered, heads nod. Everyone gets it. The devil is in the details, which means, I have no clue how in the devil's dwelling this idea will work. Occasionally, a substitute is called in?e.g., it's all about the implementation?yet the denotation is unchanged.
Have you ever wanted to grow your ?emotional intelligence including managing your gremlin,? while receiving training in ?resilience? or ?creativity??
Think your college student is holed up in the library, studying away for dozens of hours? Think again. According to a recent policy brief by AEI there has been a dramatic decrease in student study time since the 1960s. In 1961 the average student at a four-year university studied about twenty hours a week. Fast forward fifty years and students are studying only fourteen hours a week!
Fordham’s hometown of Dayton is famous not only for the Wright Brothers but also for being a school choice mecca.
Sam Sperry, Center on Reinventing Public Education July 2010 This working paper by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) discusses the diverse needs of three “portfolio” school districts – Denver, New York, and New Orleans – when it comes to communications and marketing practices.
Ohio’s faces an unprecedented $8 billion budget deficit next year. With 40 percent of state revenue invested in K-12 education, Ohio’s public schools will surely have to endure a fair share of the cuts. To his credit, Governor Strickland has taken action, asking the Cincinnati-based KnowledgeWorks Foundation to investigate options for cost-savings and efficiencies in education.
Ohio charter schools could face funding cuts of 10 percent, 15 percent, or more in the next biennial budget. But the state budget crisis also will give charters an opportunity to talk about the current financial inequities between them and district schools.
Heather Zavadsky, American Enterprise Institute (AEI)July 2010
Annie E. Casey FoundationJuly 2010The Annie E. Casey Foundation recently released its annual Kids Count Data Book, an analysis of various indicators related to child/youth wellbeing, such as infant mortality rates, teen birth rates, and the number of teens not enrolled in high school.
That's one upshot of a fascinating new Education Next article out today. It examines whether respondents are right when they tell pollsters that their local schools are worthy of an A, B, C, D, or F grade.
Longtime Flypaper readers may remember the early days of the blog, when Liam Julian would send up five or six penetrating posts in a single 24-hour period.
So begins a mass e-mail from Organizing for America: When teachers demand job protections, generous benefits, and salary increases in the midst of a recession...well, that's expecting special treatment, indeed. Michael ?